Google is quickly becoming the next punching bag on the street. When they were small and a private company most people just took them for granted.
Since they went public, Google has had their fair share of people suing them and with acquisition of Utube.com, you cam bet there will be more. However, I saw this article from "Yahoo News" http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061123/ap_on_hi_te/google_vs_newspapers_4 and thought that this must be a first. Google being sued for including someone’s content in their search engine (Copiepresse a French language newspaper in Belgium).
After all, it's the job of an SEO like myself is to get companies content in Google and not to exclude it. Of course, this court case specifically takes issue with Google News (news.google.com) and that they took content without permission.
Perhaps I've been in this came for too long, but search engines always assumed they had permission unless you told them otherwise. Isn't that what the robots.txt file is for?
In this instance, Google quickly responded and removed the offending content, but the lawsuit is still there. I'm sure Google is taking all this in stride.
It does beg the question; if legal challenges like this become successful does it mean the end of search engines as we know them? For now, I'll concentrate on getting my clients content up there and ranking well. After all, the more organizations that decided not have their content included, the better my chances are of ranking well.
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